The Way of the Wild eBook

It was the boy with the bicycle that did it; or, rather,
it was the unhappy hen-pheasant that made him.
She, being in extremis, had made some noise
among the stiff dead leaves. It was not much
of a noise, but it caught the boy’s young ear,
and he bent forward to peer at the hedge.

One of the men saw him, said something, to which the
boy nodded, jumped down into the ditch, and thrusting
in a long arm, began to feel with a purposeful hand.
The hen-pheasant, whose nerves were already shattered
to little pieces, struggled to get out of reach, and
in a second had given the whole show away.

But I like to think of what our cunning old cock-pheasant
did then. He did nothing—­absolutely
nothing at all. Crouching as flat as an overturned
saucer, just, behind the hen-pheasant’s tail,
he remained stiller than a bunch of dead leaves, and
far more silent. And this, mark you, when the
hen-pheasant was pulled out, frantically fluttering
and helpless, and there and then had her neck wrung
in front of his very eyes. That, my masters,
needed a nerve, after all that he had gone through.
What?

The two men, seeming to think that they had got enough
for one quiet walk, departed, not quickly, but without
unnecessary delay. The man who had been looking
for the hen-pheasant, and had seen nothing of what
took place at the gap, gave it up, and went away over
the grass to the shooters. The shooting ended
with one last double shot, at one last old cock-pheasant
driven reluctantly from the last hush of the covert;
the dogs were out, galloping all over the ground for
the wounded and the slain; the watchers in the road
departed; the shooters gradually merged into groups,
and drew farther and farther away up the park; and
the boy, who was shy, mounted his bicycle and rode
off into the sad blue-gray of the gathering dusk.

The big day was over, and the old cock-pheasant was
alone with the melancholy song of a single robin,
and a chaffinch calling “Chink!” And the
cold breath of the sunset wind, shuddering and sighing
all to itself across the face of the empty scene,
touched the feathers that were left by the hen-pheasant
attached to thorns and twigs in her last struggle,
so that they danced and wavered and flickered before
the old cock’s eyes, as a reminder of all that
had been for them in the past—­the past,
which for him, but never for her, might be again.